Overwatch

Overwatch went live this week in the culmination of two years of build up by Blizzard. The game is at it’s simplest a first-person shooter where two teams of characters – heroes – fight over objectives. Blizzard is not exactly your normal game developer and as you might expect Overwatch is not exactly your normal FPS.

Load up and you play you and your team get to select your heroes – who I was very happy to find were all unlocked from the first play. Overwatch will prompt you if you don’t have what it considers a good mix but will let you go whichever way you want to. Want to field a team with six identical heroes and you can.

Wait times have traditionally been a problem in PVP games and Overwatch seems to have solved this by putting you in a free for all while you wait – although the worst wait time I’ve had is two and a half minutes.

Get into the game and you are given one of three types of mission. Escort has you accompany a moving payload with one team defending it and the other trying to stop it. Assault is a straight attack or defend and Control is king of the hill to control specific points.

After the game, you get your stats and XP awards (even on losing) and the chance to vote towards who you thought was player of the game – including among the enemies. Then you do the same thing all over again on a different map with a different objective.

So let’s talk stats – what’s in the game at launch? 12 maps, 21 heroes of four types and with 4 abilities each. That’s a lot to be thrown in at you and in combination, it’s very confusing and chaotic to start off with but go with the flow and it quickly makes sense.

The game feels deep and the heroes well rounded and full of personality. Their play style is very carefully designed with something in here for every player but you don’t get the full impact of the game until you stop trying to play as one individual hero and instead start working as a team. At that point, it turns from a good game to a great game.

Product Information

Price: £29 – £45

Included in the box: Full game access. Blizzard has also committed to ranked play next month, more characters and more maps in the future with no extra charges.

Paid Extras: Ingame cosmetic skins can be purchased in loot boxes at costs from £1.59 for 2 to £31.99 for 50. These are cosmetic only and can also be earned by playing.

Blizzard was formed in 1991 and scored their first big hit in 1994 with the original Warcraft. They’ve been through a huge number of changes since that point including merging with Activision and currently have almost 5000 employees and an annual revenue over 1 billion dollars a year.

Design

The design and UI of Overwatch is colourful and simple. Your health shows up in figures and a graph in the bottom left and your normal abilities, ammo and timers in the bottom right with your ultimate ability in the centre. By default, the UI also shows the keys and helpful hints on your heroes abilities. Once you get a little more used to playing a particular character it’s possible to change their particular controls as well. For example, Lucio by default can switch between healing and speeding up team movement, this can be changed between toggling and press to speed with healing left as the default background.

Genre: First Person Team based PVP Shooter with an AI training mode

12 fixed maps that are used in different ways depending on the team orders. The maps are intricate and have numerous levels and sight-lines.

Length of game: Gameplay sessions from 10 to 20 depending on map and how long things draw out.

Style: Cartoony non-graphic but some violence.

Immersive – fast paced and requires full attention.

PEGI/ESRB rating 12

Platforms: Xbox One, PS4 and PC

Number of players: Two teams of 6 people. Some modes can have AI to fill in.

Color blindness modes built in.

Audio plays an important role with everything from different sounds of footsteps for different heroes to different pitches of healing beam depending on how fast you heal.

All controls remappable and Xbox controller compatible.

Difficulty settings: one difficulty setting but teams are assembled based on the player’s level and the opposition is matched to that.

Discrimination where mechanism persecution is considered a part of the norm, discrimination, violent death, violence, rewards for violence.

Cost-Effective

Overwatch is available for £29 direct from Blizzard. They have committed to ranked play in the next month and more heroes and maps in the future and that the only extra costs will be for cosmetic items. That’s a steal.

Verdict

Blizzard is company that tends to redefine whatever genre of game it decides to put out. I’ve dabbled with FPS and area PVP over the years but Overwatch is the first game I’ve ever played where it all seems to go together perfectly.

We’re a few days past launch so it’s hard to tell what will happen in the future but for right now Overwatch is brilliant fun, fast, furious, and a wonderful game at a decent price that is unlikely to drop further. Highly recomended for anyone with decent reaction time.

The review is based on the Overwatch kindly provided by Blizzard. Click to read more about our eco icons and access icons used in this review. This article was first published on 26th May 2016.